


Wild with all Regrets (For S.S.)

by apiphile



Category: Historical RPF, Torchwood, War Poets
Genre: Angst, Historical, M/M, WW1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-09
Updated: 2010-03-09
Packaged: 2017-10-07 20:21:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wilfred Owen meets an American soldier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wild with all Regrets (For S.S.)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from a Wilfred Owen poem.

"What's that you're writing?"

Owen covered his notebook with his sleeve guiltily and looked up at the American. They seemed to be more or less alone in the house, Hallet and the other fellow presumably out salvaging. It felt like living in an adventure story while they waited here for orders, Hallet had said, and the American had smiled one of those wide and expressive smiles that the Americans Owen had met all seemed to favour, and told him it was a different kind of story at the Front. He'd evidently been out before, been injured, been sent back. Something like Owen, but perhaps … more decent.

Owen appreciated those Americans who had, by their own means, left their country before their government had deigned to dip in and address the problem in Europe, and signed up to His Majesty's Armed Forces instead to lend their skills or simply their bodies. This Captain – Captain … _Harkness_, that was his name – was one of that sort. Jolly good type. Unfortunately such effortless courage made Owen feel even worse about Craiglockhart, about ever having been away from the Front.

"What's that you're writing?" Captain Harkness repeated with unfeigned interest. He was closer now. He looked like a recruitment poster, all square jawed with huge blue eyes and thick brown hair, and although he was significantly older than the other officers in the house (Owen judge him not yet forty but probably over thirty) there was something boyish about his smiles.

"N-nothing," Owen muttered, cursing his stammer, "just a p-poem." He closed his tiny notebook, and hoped it didn't look like the gesture of defence that it was.

"Can I see?" Captain Harkness, a bastion of enthusiasm and intrusion.

"It's n-not – it's n-n-not f-f – it's – " he took a deep breath and said, looking at the table between the two of them, "it's not finished yet." He added almost automatically, "it's n-not any good."

Captain Harkness gave him an oddly intent look that made the short-shaved hairs on Owen's neck stand to attention. "I've read your poetry," the Captain said with bewildering intensity. Owen did not ask him how he had done this. "It _is_ good."

Owen looked at his notebook again. He'd barely got into the habit of letting Sassoon see it, and that was only because the greater craftsman would elevate it to standards Owen could never hope to achieve on his own, and because he trusted the man, and because, in his most private honesty, if Captain Sassoon had asked Owen to stand in the middle of a forest fire and sing the German National Anthem as he burned to death, Owen would have done it without hesitation. There was nothing he could think he would _not_ do, if it were Sassoon doing the asking.

"Sassoon's poetry is far superior," he said with quiet finality and no trace of his stammer.

The American captain looked and sounded quite exasperated by this. "Sassoon's poetry is _glib_," Harkness said, which as far as Owen was concerned was bordering on being some earthly species of blasphemy. There, that curiously _intense_ look again: "You are a _great poet_," Harkness said as though there could be no argument, as though he was quoting scripture.

Owen didn't know what to say to that, so he went a little pink and examined the table top with fierce concentration.

After some minutes had trooped past without a word Owen tried to revive and divert the conversation, in part because he felt guilty for having killed it but for the _most_ part because Captain Harkness was still watching him and it made him uncomfortable, hot under the collar, and confused.

"What, er – do you m-mind my asking, what, er, m-made you c-come and j-join up?" Own knew he might have chosen his words to cause less insult, but he wasn't sure _how_, and he was finding speaking at all very difficult in the face of Captain Harkness and his stare.

Perhaps Owen had been expecting to hear what he had overheard from other overseas recruits – a certain high moral belief, a desire for peace, an unwise yearning for action – but Harkness looked quite melancholy as he replied, "Fighting's about all I'm good for."

Owen, so careful with his words, noticed that – that the American did not say "the only thing I am good _at_" but "good _for_". He wanted to say "at least you're good for _something_" but the words stuck between his tongue and his palate and gradually self-loathing overtook self-pity. There was instead another long pause.

"Well," Harkness amended, sitting down on the table and giving Owen another very toothy smile, "maybe not _all_ …" and he actually _winked_.

Owen stared determinedly at the back of his own hands but his face was burning up anyway.

"Who is it?" Harkness asked in a very low voice.

"I beg your pardon?" Owen asked, too startled to stutter.

Harkness raised his eyebrows. "I know unrequited love when I see it." He examined Owen's face so closely that Owen felt horrified, sure that every note of his existence was scrawled on his face. Why must these Americans be so inquisitive? Why must they be so astute? "Who is he?" Harkness murmured.

"_He_?" Owen baulked. He almost leapt away from the table. "W-what m-makes you th-think – "

"Will – can I call you Will?"

Owen wanted to say that he couldn't, because no one had ever called him "Will". His family called him "Wilfred" and everyone else called him "Owen" or "Sir"; but his stomach had knotted itself painfully into a ball and he felt as though he couldn't breathe or shake his head. He stared dumbly at the American.

"Will. Unrequited love isn't the only thing I'm good at spotting. Who is he?"

"D-doesn't m-matter," Owen took another deep breath and said very quietly, each syllable striking his heart an unwelcome hammer blow, "it _is_ unrequited."

Harkness patted him on the shoulder, some sort of gesture of consolation that was more touch than Owen thought he could stand, and whispered, "He's blind, or an idiot, then."

Owen bridled immediately. "H-he is _not_."

"To ignore or reject you, he'd have to be." The American's unnerving stare came strong again on Owen's face, but it was less discomfiting this time. Owen considered these words (and noticed that Harkness had not released his shoulder). He knew he was barely worthy of a second glance: he was small, and dark, and his moustache was dreadful but his clean-shaven face was worse, and both fortune and Sassoon favoured the tall and blond and fair of skin. Not some stammering mouse as dark as a gypsy. Owen considered raising this point but he thought, _Harkness has eyes. Surely he can see for himself – he sees everything else_.

What Harkness did or did not see with his startlingly clear blue eyes was evidently not what Owen saw in the mirrors and windows of England (there were few enough left intact in France by now), for he leaned down from his perch atop the pilfered table and repeated with his eyes half-shut, "You are a _great poet_."

Owen swallowed as delicately as he could, very conscious of his adam's apple moving up and down his throat, of his short hairs standing up, of how dry his mouth had become and how heavy his limbs.

He knew afterward that he had known what would happen next, but at the time he told himself that he was shocked and stunned; Captain Harkness took his hand from Owen's shoulder and cupped it instead around his jawbone, at the juncture of face and neck. His hand was warm and, for a man whom Owen had observed piling fallen masonry the day before, smooth and soft. Harkness – Owen wondered if he had a Christian name at all – put his thumb over Owen's cheek and swept the ball of it along his cheek bone, and all the while those distressing and intense eyes the colour of June skies peered into his as if searching for something.

It was with sadness rather than a start than Owen realised that no one had ever touched his face this way before, and that there was a good chance that no one ever would again. The thought was almost impossible to bear.

The American's nose almost touched Owen's. He considered tipping his head, but he was loath to in any way dislodge the warm, comforting and yet saddening hand upon his face. There was little time for debating with himself, however: Harkness whispered with an amused inflection, "Call me Jack," and the breath of his words tickled Owen's moustache.

And Owen barely thought to shut his eyes.

Then he was being kissed, or kissing, or both. There was little doubt that Harkn - _Jack_ \- had kissed often or many mouths; his lips were sure and certain. Owen felt the knot in his stomach dissolve like soapflakes in water and his hands awkward and small, crawled cautiously to a hold on the front of Har - _Jack's_ \- tunic. Owen was not certain he was doing right at all, but he felt pretty sure of the point where their lips touched and even as Jack's tongue – like an oyster, or a clam – parted them and touched the tip of his, Owen forgot to be alarmed at all.

He could not have said how long this went on – his heart thumping in his ears, his fingertips tingling against the rough wool tunic, the smell of Jack in his nostrils – only that he was sorry when it ended, and that when he opened his eyes Jack's face was still close enough that he might have counted every lash on the man's eyes, if he could have in his addled state recalled how to count at all.

"C'mon," Jack said breathlessly, and took his hand as if they were both schoolgirls on an outing. Owen missed the warm pressure of Jack's hand on his face like an absent friend, but he rose on unsteady legs and allowed himself to be led to the stairs, up to the rooms where they had been billeted. Owen was sure Jack needn't even have taken his hand, that he would have followed his smile wherever it beckoned.

In the green dappled light (a tree had fallen by the window of the room, and sunshine only made it to the spiderweb-cracked glass through a blockade of ivy leaves) Owen was less certain. He had no idea what to do, and his chest felt so might he might have been corseted.

Jack took both Owen's wrists in his hands and, with an open and sunny grin, set his hands on Jack's tunic buttons. He jerked his eyebrows aloft. "You know what to do really," the American said.

Owen shook his head mutely, afraid his tongue would betray him. He began undoing the buttons, hampered a little (but happily so) when Jack, overcome by impatience, seized his face between both hands and kissed him again.

To undress a man in full uniform is difficult and takes a long time; it is even more lengthy a process, even more awkward a task, when one cannot see what one is doing and when one's mind is being driven to madness by unprecedented kisses; and so before Owen even came to grapple with Jack's braces he began to feel something like terror and something like _shame_, in the sense that the dreadful supposed poet Lord Douglas used it as well as the conventional.

But whatever peaks of guilt or horror he approached were smoothed away by the action of Jack's lips on his.

By the time Jack stood naked as a newborn before him, unselfconscious and smiling so that he almost seemed to _smirk_, Owen knew very well what he himself was about to do.

As Jack kissed him again, the American put a friendly hand to the area of Owen that he had always tried to avoid describing, and Owen did not flinch away but pressed himself against that welcome warm palm.

He was still not sure what to do with his own hands, letting them rest awkwardly on Jack's nape and wondering at how soft the bristles of re-growing hair were – not wiry and sharp like his, not like him at all. He began to feel quite self-conscious again, very aware of his own body, and for a second he thought he must have done the wrong thing with his hands after all, for Jack broke the kiss and bounded away.

The American returned, however, with some sort of jar in his hands, and unscrewed it with one eyebrow raised. Owen found himself amazed to learn that it was possible to be filled with apprehension as well as a most visceral longing all at the same time; Jack, moving with deftness surely born of long practice, extracted the most sensitive part of Owen from his trousers – leaving them and his long-johns about his thighs – and began wiping something from the jar onto him with assured strokes.

Whatever Owen had been expecting to happen next – and afterwards he could not be clear – it was not for Jack to bend over the bed and smile back at him with those brilliantly white tombstone teeth. That wasn't the way around that he'd envisioned things happening at all.

"I c-can't – I d-don't _know_ –"

For an answer Jack put his hands up and pulled apart his buttocks like a man awaiting a medical inspection. Owen's head rushed as the blood left it for other business in the south of him, and he found one hand upon Jack's hip and the other guiding … guiding _him_ into Jack. There seemed to be more hands now than Owen actually possessed, and he knew Jack was also guiding him.

Of all pleasant sensations in his life so far, the hot pressure of a body closing _around_ him was by a long shot the strangest. Owen closed his eyes to steady himself and wished he were drunk. Perhaps this would all seem normal if he were drunk.

He pushed, gently, and Jack made a sound that was not quite a hiss of pain and not quite the fierce grunts of men that Owen – invisible, insignificant Owen – should never have been able to hear at all (all those Tommies who couldn't be expected to control themselves), all those Tommies and their ladies of the night. It was a _loose_ noise, a _pierced_ noise, and it was a noise that did something so extraordinary to the dark and muddy corners of his mind that his eyes flew open and his mouth threatened to do the same.

"_More_," Jack mumbled with a kind of impatience, a kind of desperation in his voice. "Will, _please_."

Owen felt dizzy. He leaned further in, something like shock assaulting his spine as his testicles brushed the back of Jack's thighs. Owen wondered what word Jack might use for the part of _him_ that was buried deep inside Jack – there seemed to be _so many_ and none of them seemed right.

And Jack, beneath him, wriggled and thrust back into Owen's hips, and Owen bent over his broad naked shoulders and laid his face on Jack's spine and tried to think clearly. He tried to absorb the moment through the skin of his cheek and the smell of Jack's sweat, and he tried to think of a word, the right words for the sounds Jack made, for the fizzing feeling in his stomach, for Jack groping for his hand and pulling it to clutch at that engorged scrap of flesh –

Owen stopped thinking of words. There was only feeling and colour and smell and sound, and all of them so _primal_ that no poet could ever do justice to them, that no dictionary could ever contain them. Experiences that could only be described by enacting them; universal _verbs_.

And too soon the clenched fist of his abdomen became a loose hand, and all the taut strings holding little puppet Owen collapsed, and Jack's … Jack's … Jack's _prick_ was jerking and spluttering in his hand.

Owen was a civilized man. He was an educated man. He felt sure he had slipped again into some terrible madness, some moment-long derangement of the mind, for though the most part of him was now cold and revolted by his hand's coating of … of masculine excreta … by this act worse than staining oneself with urine – there was a small private voice in him that whispered, _lick it. Taste it. Eat it_.

While he dithered, Jack rolled out from under him and flopped naked and belly-up like a landed trout, half on and half-off the narrow bed. Owen lay carefully beside him, clothed and uncommonly sticky, and saw Jack's torso streaked with sweat and his look of self-satisfaction and flushed cheeks and thought, _Did I do that?_

"Thank you," Owen murmured, because he didn't know what else to say.

Jack stroked his cheek with a lazy hand. "This war is such a waste of … wonderful lives," Jack said distantly. He sounded as though he was addressing someone who was not in the room. "_Something_ good should come out of it. All these lives, all these thoughts …"

Owen said sadly, "Y-you sound like Sass – l-like Sassoon."

"Probably," Jack said in the same far-away voice.

"Th-there's … there's someone, isn't there?" Owen said in a much quieter voice. There was a spider-web on the ceiling above the bed, and somewhere outside the window a crow made a harsh corvine remark.

"There was," Jack admitted, tracing a long slow sigil over his own sternum. "It doesn't really matter."

"Un-unrequited?" Owen asked, though he thought he knew the answer already. He thought perhaps he could see it just as Jack could see it, and for the same reasons.

Jack didn't answer for a long time. When he did he laid his hands flat on his chest and spoke without inflection. "He's … I'm a long, long way beneath him. He made that _real_ clear." Jack exhaled slowly and said with forced brightness, "And it doesn't matter anyway. It was a long, long time ago."

It obviously mattered enough to have left a wound, but Owen was wise enough and polite enough not to say this. "Was", the first of them, caught up with his mind and instead he asked perhaps not as delicately as he should, "_W-was_? Is he – "

"Dead?" Jack interrupted. "No. Just gone."

He rolled over and kissed Owen lightly on the forehead, which Owen had not been expecting, and got off the bed, searching for the components of his uniform with his strangely flawless back to the bed. Owen wished he'd said something else, that he'd known how to make Jack stay on the bed, that he had … that he himself had taken just one minute to lie in someone's arms, just once.

That afternoon Captain Harkness got his orders and moved on out without so much as a backward glance or a wave. The day passed slowly after that; that evening when Owen opened his notebook he found that the draft he had been working on was gone – a ragged tear along the spine was all that remained of the poem.

Somehow, he wasn't surprised.


End file.
